Welcome to the PC Gamer Game of the Year Awards 2013. For an explanation of how the awards were decided, a round-up of all the awards and the list of judges, check here.

Traditional storytelling techniques suffer in the transition to interactive entertainment. While many games choose to compartmentalise their storytelling and interactive sections, others experiment with new methods. In Gone Home, exploration becomes a form of authorship. The entwined stories of each family member unravel at your command as you flick through the detritus of their lives. The resulting tale was the most affecting of the year.

A warning for those who haven't played it yet, the discussion below does contain a few spoilers.

TYLER Gone Home s interlocking tales of love, rejection and regret are exposed almost wholly by the artefacts left by your family members as you explore their new house. The story is moving (although the sentimentality sometimes borders on schmaltzy), but what makes Gone Home extra special is how it s told. More than interacting with spaces and things, I m interacting with motivations and fears, solving a maze with empathy rather than spatial reasoning. In a medium rife with expository cutscenes and deus ex machina, Gone Home brings vital innovation to the art of the interactive narrative. Also, I teared up a little at the end, if you must know.

ANDY I was expecting the worst. I went into this game not knowing a single thing about it, and in every dark room, and around every dark corner, I was expecting something horrible. So it was a relief, and a pleasant surprise, to discover that it just wanted to tell me a story about people. This was far more interesting than serial killers or ghosts or whatever I was bracing myself to encounter in those gloomy, eerily quiet corridors. Even as I climbed to the attic I was preparing to stumble across something grim, but instead I found a beautiful, touching end to a wonderfully understated human story. Years of playing videogames have trained my brain to always expect conflict or danger, and it was nice to have those expectations subverted. I too have a low tolerance for schmaltz, but Gone Home was on just the right side of sentimental for me.

TONY It s all in the dad s room. It s set up so that the first thing you come across is his desk, where you discover what seem to be the scribblings of a would-be science fiction writer. This is a dad with dreams. Then, as you work your way around his den you find the boxes of books with his name on and realise he made it: he s a published author. That s great! Good for you, unfulfilled American 90s dad! Only... why are there so many boxes of his book? Then you read the publisher s letter, rejecting his latest manuscript because his books have all bombed. Lastly, you read the snarky editor s memo from the consumer electronics magazine the dad works at now, writing puff pieces about hi-fis, and realise that this is a dad who went for his dream and failed. A whole life in boxes, in a single room.

CHRIS It s been said that Gone Home subverts our expectations of what a game experience should be in order to tell a different kind of story but what I like most about it is that it s not about throwing away what games are good at. Games are a form of communication that demands mutual participation. Good games expect your critical engagement, and treat you like someone capable of interpreting situations and environments intelligently without the need for hand-holding. There s something positive and hopeful about entertainment that wants you to be active, not passive.

Gone Home is, as much as any other game on this list, a game about making choices. Not which soldier to turn into a robot, but where to go, what to look for, what to choose to attribute meaning to. It s about following lines of potential through to the point where you discover what is, a drama that celebrates the things your brain is doing when you re switched on and engaged with the world.

PC Gamer editors are prohibited from celebrating Christmas. For the team, the end of the year is marked by an event known as GOTY Sleepover, a time where we somewhat-voluntarily sequester ourselves away from our families and loved ones in the interest of a greater good: selecting the best PC games of the year. We gather in a room with a very heavy door and very little ventilation and stay there until we ve reached a unanimous decision on every award category. It s a lot like the Papal conclave, but with more Cheetos.

So far, this is what we ve got. These are games nominated for awards in general, not just our single Game of the Year. Consider this a short-list of the games our team loved in 2013, one we ll whittle down into proper, named awards in the coming days.


Dota 2
Arma 3
Spelunky
Battlefield 4
Gone Home
Tomb Raider
Rising Storm
Saints Row IV
Papers, Please
BioShock Infinite
Total War: Rome II
The Stanley Parable
XCOM: Enemy Within

Check in each day over the holiday break to see who's victorious. In the meantime, here's our 2012 winners and some lively year-end video conversations about our best PC gaming experiences in 2013.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent developer Frictional Games recently revealed that The Fullbright Company’s indie title, Gone Home, first saw life through the Amnesia engine. And if you're interested in the prototype, you can try it right now.

Frictional Games co-founder Thomas Grip notes in a company blog post that he denies all requests to use the HPL2 engine in a commercial game, as there’s no documentation for the engine and Frictional Games simply doesn’t have the time to support the engine. Instead, Grip would suggest using Unity or UDK (Unreal Development Kit). Steve Gaynor, who helped craft the haunting tale that is Gone Home, asked Grip whether his team could use the engine for what would become Gone Home, but received the same answer.

Fullbright ended up following Grip’s advice and used Unity to shape Gone Home—but not before building the first prototype with the HPL2 engine anyway. After all, Grip only denied requests to license the engine for commercial products.

Grip and Gaynor reconnected after Gone Home’s launch, with Grip asking if Gaynor still had the “Amnesia version” of Gone Home tucked away in his computer. Gaynor just so happened to have a copy, and now that copy is available to you.

Grip said Gaynor requested the HPL2 license way back in January of last year, and speculates that the Fullbright Company must have been utilizing the HPL2 engine before asking Grip if the final version of Gone Home could use that license. Basically, this means the Amnesia prototype is a very early version of what Gone Home would eventually become.

To navigate Gone Home’s earliest, creakiest walls, just download the prototype and extract the file into Amnesia: The Dark Descent’s “custom_stories” directory. If you see something called “Test Game” after selecting “Custom Stories” on Amnesia’s main menu, you’re good to go. At least the Gone Home prototype doesn’t have invincible flesh monsters roaming the halls…right?

This week's podcast is all about Steam's three, big announcements. What do SteamOS, Steam Machines, and the Steam Controller mean to PC gaming? How does it all work? How much does it cost? Does Valve want to replace your main rig? Your living room entertainment center? All of the above? How would Nicholas Cage fare in the political landscape of the 15th Century?

Cory, Evan, and T.J. answer all of these questions to the best of their ability in PC Gamer Podcast 363 - Gabecube!

Have a question, comment, complaint, or observation? Send an MP3 to pcgamerpodcast@gmail.com or call us toll-free at 877-404-1337 x724.

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There is a strong feeling of place in The Fullbright Company’s Gone Home. A critically-lauded first person exploration game about a house and its inhabitants, Gone Home tells a powerful, moving story about two sisters’ lives through the artifacts of the everyday. The tapes left lying around the house are tracks from Riot Grrrl bands, the sort that grew out of Portland, Oregon in the 90s. Letters and postcards addressed to the house litter every surface. Like its spiritual parent the Bioshock series, the environment is the fabric of the story itself. The relationships the family have with each other, their neighbours, their childhood friends, their longings fall into relief as you traverse this home. There’s no doubt in your mind once you finish the game that this house contained real people who liked each other, got on with each other, were a family.

"We worked together before and we made something we were proud of before."

The Fullbright Company - Steve Gaynor, Karla Zimonja, Johnnemann Nordhagen and Kate Craig - live in a house together in Portland, Oregon. This is where Gone Home was made. This is a retrospective look at the collaborative aspects of how Gone Home was produced, and how pragmatic game design and projects of a strict scope can be more of an expression of who the creators are. Go and play the excellent Gone Home now, if you haven't already, for what proceeds are a few small spoilers.

The co-founders of The Fullbright Company gained their development expertise working on big projects like Bioshock 2 and the Minerva's Den expansion and wanted a project of their own. The first step was to find a space for that to happen in. “The reason we are in Portland is because I used to live here,” Steve says. “I went to college here and my wife is from here, so my wife and I had decided to be here already. We were going to be here. At the very least, Karla and Johnnemann knew that I was already here. We had a base of operations. The first place we started working together was in my wife’s parents’ house while they were out of town while we looked for our own place.”

“We worked together before and we made something we were proud of before, and the fact that I set up a base camp before people moved up here to meet up with me, at least there was a little bit of solidarity."

Fullbright got a house together in Portland to build a fictional house in nearby Tillimook.

Throughout Gone Home there is a strong feeling of not only place, but transience. The feeling of the recently uprooted. You play as Kaitlin Greenbriar, the eldest daughter who has just returned to her family’s new house from wandering Europe. From the address on the Wellspring Movers invoice found in the lobby, you can look up the zip code of where in Oregon the fictional house is situated. It’s a Tillamook zip code: OR 97141. A little adventure in Google Maps shows you that Tillamook is green, tree-laden landscape that reminds me of a flatter Scotland. Tillamook is mostly populated with dairy farms. It is a place that has a removed quality about it. It looks peaceful.

"By the time we hit the ground we were ready to start putting stuff on the screen."

One can imagine that this is a sense of transience that was felt in the Gone Home studio. Everyone left to work on this intense project, and now they have finished they are moving again. “We will get paid soon." Steve says. "The biggest reason we all split a house was that we are living off our savings, it’s a big reason we’re in Portland, the production constraint for this project was how long could we live on the money that we have. We all split rent to keep costs low.”

The move is indicative of the team's pragmatic approach to production. Gone Home was created in just a year and a half of disciplined development, controlled by a keen awareness of the team's limits. “The big thing was the biggest parameter of what kind of game we could make, knowing who we had and what we were good at was a prerequisite," says Steve. "So we started coming up with specifics between the point where we had left all our old jobs. Karla and Johnnemann moved up here, we were actually on site ready to start producing stuff. By the time we hit the ground we were ready to start putting stuff on the screen.”

Each character in the Gone Home house has their own individual story strand: Samantha embarks on a teenage romance, a budding fiction writer; Terry, the father, is in a sort of mid-life crisis, struggling with his publisher to have his latest book published; the mother is meditating quite clearly on having an affair. The boy next door even figures, someone who you sense is not just after Nintendo games. Each member of the family, even Kaitlin, contributes an important foundation to Gone Home’s narrative.

The Fullbright team: Steve Gaynor, Johnnemann Nordhagen, Karla Zimonja and Kate Craig.

I ask Karla and Steve if putting together the pillars of the Gone Home team was like putting together the A Team. “ It definitely was,” Steve says, matter-of-factly. “Some people may say A Team, some people may say like a band I guess.”

“Or like Voltron,” Karla says.

“Karla is really good at being our right leg if we’re going with the Voltron thing,” Steve agrees. “But it depends on what metaphor we’re working with. It is very much like at Marin, one person was responsible for each specific discipline. It was like programmer, 2D artist, 3D artist, and writer/designer. You know, all those aspects overlapped, and as far as we were giving input to each other and kicking ideas about what each other was working on, but at the end of the day… yes all the 2D art in the game was from Karla, and all the 3D models in the game will be from Kate with a rare exception.

“I touched the very tiniest bit of Johnnemann’s code once or twice or something,” Steve adds, “but for all intents and purposes he programmed every single thing in the game that didn’t come with the unity engine. So yeah I think it is really nice actually to be ‘I own this one great elemental part of the game, and be totally responsible for it."

This approach produced an extremely streamlined game that didn’t do more than it had to, or fall short of anything. Each person in the team had experience in exploratory storytelling, so they knew that was the kind of game they were best at making together.





“The reason that we could go a year and a half from - let’s try downloading Unity to ‘we have reviews of the game up online’,” Steve says, “Is because we came up with a very small well-scoped plan early and then we just did it, and we didn’t run into anything where we lost four months of work or anything else. There was a lot of luck to that, we are insanely lucky that we found Kate Craig who did our 3D art, because a month or two after we started on the project we happened to meet her, she just happened to be a 3D artist and she happened to be interested on working on something new."

Fullbright's lean development management is also reflected in Gone Home's design, as Steve explains. “I think that what we did is take games that did have established frameworks that we had worked on before, we were reductive about it and we removed elements until we had as little as we needed to get this experience across, then we added very little back in to specifically support what we were doing.

"For the most part it was like ‘we know this genre of exploratory FPS games, if we scale back as far as possible and then add in as little as possible to mould what we are doing to that specific end…’ That was the process that we had, which I think is an interesting middle ground between ‘okay we’re just going to take an established genre do that thing everybody knows what it is,’ and ‘let’s start from scratch and assume nothing and be as experimental as possible.’“

Gone Home toys with the horror expectations players have gained from games like Bioshock 2.

Taking an established way of looking at games led to the team being extremely puckish with game-literate players. At one point you see a bath slathered in red; you can’t help but think the worst.“People think they’ve seen this kind of thing, ‘when they did this last there was a monster,’ It’s normal to make those associations,” Karla says. “ ‘haha you thought we were going to do this, you’re an idiot.’”

“It wasn’t pulling a prank on the player,” Steve says. “The intent on my end was what you’re pointing out is that in a game there’s going to be something unreal or fantastical about the setting – because there might as well be. If you can have your game and have your ghosts and zombies in it. That’s something that’s expected."

"Your assumption is that there’s going to be some kind of crazy thing – a monster in a closet or something."

At another juncture the Greenbriar parents have left a Post-It note admonishing the youngest sister Samantha for leaving all the lights on in the house - something that you as a player have been doing ever since you started the game. Gone Home plays with the idea of ‘unreality’ in games, pointedly telling the player they are here for the characters and their experience of a world that the players are familiar with. Our own.

“It is weird, in a game you don’t start with the assumption that this is a normal real world,” Steve argues, “and then there’s something weird and it’s like ‘woah that’s crazy.’ But if you’re reading a book and there’s ghosts in it, your standard expectation of this isn’t about people - it’s changed to a genre book. But with games you come from the expectation of, if you see blood then there’s probably a serial killer, if it seems haunted then it probably is. So from my point of view we had to do real work to reinforce the idea that no this is just the real world where normal people live and there is nothing in this fiction that wouldn’t be in our own reality.

“Your very assumption is that there’s going to be some kind of crazy thing – a monster in a closet or something. For me I wanted to keep pulling that imagery and whenever that imagery put on screen to saying ‘no it’s just something normal that can happen in anybody’s house, this is the real world.’ Hopefully by the end you’re concentrating on the story of these characters you’re learning about and not ‘oh it’s now the ghost is going to jump out on me’.”



Due to the stringent descoping of the Gone Home team on anything that wasn’t strictly necessary, there were so few problems in development that Karla has to tell me about the time she tried to put a skeleton in a pillow. “You know when you drop a pillow on the floor and you expect it to scrunch,” Karla says, musing on pillow poofiness. “We thought we could see if we could make ragdoll physics for the pillows. We needed to have ragdoll with Unity, we tried to do it and it didn’t work multiple times, and I thought ‘I have no idea what I’m doing,’ I talked to a guy at Unity and he said ‘you can’t do ragdoll that aren’t humans!’ So I tried to put a human skeleton inside a pillow, it was weird, but that also didn’t work. So we were like ‘okay we’re not going to have squishy pillows.’”

"I tried to put a human skeleton inside a pillow, it was weird."

But working in the Gone Home house - wasn’t it hard, living with your workmates? Seeing them every day?

“Well I totally want to be like ‘well not once we all took the medication, then it was fine!’” Karla laughs. “I don’t think we had any major issues. I think we were all pretty grown up about it, because we are grownups and we’ve had roommates before and stuff. I like having roommates because I tend to be a creepy hermit because it’s nice to be around people who do things who you can talk to. So you don’t get up one morning and think ‘I haven’t spoken to a human being in five days’. I don’t think we had any problems.”

And so what was a day in development like?

“It’s a lot of working in parallel,” Steve says. “Each of us had our area and responsibilities that were well compartmentalised from everybody else’s. I, being the level designer, had to touch all of it, my work was clearing what everybody else was putting into the game. I ended up knowing what notes Karla had finished that were ready to put in the game, and I had to know what 3D meshes Kate had done, I needed to know what stage the system was working in so I could start using it and so on and so forth. “

“Our jobs had way more variety. We were very seldom stuck for weeks working on the same thing. Even if it was like ‘press event, let’s work towards that.’ It’s really valuable to be able to do that, rather than ‘we have you down for 200 assets, which number are you on now?’” Karla adds.

Read on for discussion of Gone Home's ending. If you haven't finished the game, stop reading, there be huge spoilers ahead.





Now commences a discussion of the ending. If you haven’t reached the ending, huge spoilers from here on.

The ending was a surprise to everyone. Samantha, the younger sister, and her crush Lonnie decide to run off together, something that is sort of reminiscent, to me anyway, of Thelma and Louise’s driving into the sunset. Though Thelma and Louise’s ending is somewhat more of the impending doom nature, there is a sense that Samantha and Lonnie do have a lot of obstacles in the way of their relationship - not least their youth, the disapproval of their parents - even society’s disapproval itself. But it’s a grand romantic gesture, a bid for freedom that ends on a happy, inspirational note, written with grace by Fullbright.

"The ending was a lot more melancholy for a really long time."

Was there a temptation to end the story with a grand tragedy instead?

“Not grand in the sense of everyone throws themselves down a well,” Karla says.

“We never had an ending where everybody was dead, it was never quite that far,” Steve says. “We did kind of start from the point of thinking of Romeo and Juliet being an initial archetypal model. The ending was a lot more melancholy for a really long time. They weren’t going to get to be together at the ending and it was going to be kind of, not a straight up downer, still a sort of ambiguous semi-interpretive ending. As we were going to figure out what the motivators were as I was writing it. It was not fitting to us, this is just not interesting they grow apart and they don’t get to be together, they feel kind of sad. Oh okay I guess they just felt sad? The end?



“So we wanted at that point we were resolved to say what’s going to be interesting all of the obstacles that stand between them being together and that those weren’t external obstacles that were like ‘mum and dad say no’; they are internal obstacles like ‘mum wants this and Sam has this in her future, and society that they’re in has these expectations’. And so the conflict is internal between the two characters primarily and they want and the directions their lives are heading in. it’s a relief and it’s inspiring et cetera when they get together at the end, because they have overcome the things about themselves primarily that were going to keep them apart - and they’ve made this grand romantic gesture and put themselves through a totally uncertain situation that they’re then going to have to deal with the reality of. We didn’t know what the ending was until two weeks before we recorded the final voice session.”

"We didn’t know what the ending was until two weeks before we recorded the final voice session."

“We had to let them have their moment, let them take their chance as it were,” Karla says.

Gone Home’s ending echoes The Fullbright Company’s decision to move to Portland, take a chance on their savings lasting and, for a year and a half, work on a game that they wanted to be different, to be inspirational, and to be solely about people and their relationships to each other. Samantha and her father’s scribbles and notes illustrating the fictional lives of people they have created lie strewn across dark, empty rooms for the player to find. The house where Gone Home is set, and the house The Fullbright Company occupy, seem to be spaces where stories are possible. But as usual, Steve Gaynor is keen on downplaying any romantic notions I have about the place where Gone Home’s story was born.

“It hasn’t been too intense. We’re all sharing the same space. If you have a housemate before, you don’t see your housemate all the time. They go out and do stuff or whatever. I don’t know. It hasn’t been really dramatic or anything.”

Looking at Samantha’s last note to her sister, Kaitlin, I can’t really bring myself to agree.

For more on Gone Home, check out our review, Robert Yang's analysis of Gone Home, Thief and the Mansion Genre and Phillipa Warr's personal response, Going home with Gone Home.

I am standing outside the train station with my bags at my feet, painfully aware that I do not own a key to my parents' house. My arrival is unexpected and comes on the back of a transatlantic flight. I am exhausted but almost home.

I am standing in the front porch with my bags at my feet, painfully aware that I do not own a key to my parents' house. My arrival is unexpected and comes on the back of a transatlantic flight. I am exhausted but almost home.

I lost my keys three years ago in the snow after a friend's birthday party. Most were replaced immediately but the one to my parents' front door was always tucked away at the forgotten end of a to-do list. An unnecessary hassle and entirely my own fault.

I don't have a key yet. This isn't the house where I did most of my growing up. My parents moved about an hour's drive away while I was travelling through Europe and tonight will be the first time I see their - our - new place.

This house is not the one in which I did most of my growing up - that one is about an hour's drive away. A long spit of a building from whose windows I would climb down to watch the sunrise from the rolling slope of the municipal graveyard when I couldn't sleep. My parents moved house while I was at Glastonbury one year. I returned to an interim home and then joined them in their - our - new place.



I am looking forward to seeing my sister. I've been away for a long time and wonder how much has changed. I've sent back postcards picking out the cool things I've seen that she might want to share in somehow but missed out on the everyday and the mundane. She's changed schools and must have made new friends or lost older ones. Maybe she's different now?

I am looking forward to seeing my sister. I haven't been away long but in the time since we last saw each other her baby daughter has begun to crystallise from a warm wiggling morass of need into a tiny person. Maybe she's very different now?

I find the key under a tacky but well-loved Christmas duck ornament and let myself in. The place is dark.

I sidestep the key problem as my mother is home and rushes to the front door to let me in. I can see my sister in the brightly-lit front room pacing with her daughter, chatting singsong nonsense.

I move methodically from room to room, my family's life gradually being revealed to me in bursts. Each follows a cinematic trajectory. My sister - unhappiness, isolation, connection. My father - success, rejection, the glimmering embers of a career which may yet reignite. My mother - frustration, distraction, resolution.

I sit in the car and absorb slices of conversation, my family's life gradually easing into focus. My brother's academic work, my father's travels, my mother and my sister's involvement with the baby. I drive from place to place accumulating the impact of the thousand minor disappointments and triumphs; the abrasions of daily life.



The story my sister is unfurling through her diary entries becomes a tentative exploration of first love and I'm unsure as to whether I should be reading it even though all the entries are addressed to me. Through each one I hear her gradually arriving home; not physically but emotionally.

Nursing a mug of coffee I listen as a friend catches me up on seven years of her life. It is the day before I play Gone Home and the story she chooses to tell is a love story - one which starts in the ruins of an older love story and gradually swells into something beautiful. A place she can finally call home. It is sweet, mundane and monumental all at the same time. Her pain is recent enough to seep through in places but her joy is palpable. It is the same story as Gone Home although I don't know it yet.

Later, as myself and as Kaitlin, I listen to Sam describe her relationship. Together we scout out scrappy notes, magazines, pictures and mix tapes which describe who Sam is now and the flavour of her nineties teenage world. There's an X Files poster on the wall and a listing for the show circled in the TV guide, Riot Grrrl zines pepper the basement and badges are sprinkled throughout the house.



My own mother has asked me to go through my possessions while I'm at home including some boxes never unpacked from the house move. Three X Files guides and all my punk rock music CDs sit in the charity shop pile while the zines are destined for the tip. A handful of button badges hide away in a tiny box inside a wooden ottoman.

I climb the attic steps to Sam's safe space while sitting on the bed in my own attic room. My eyes drift over to the wall panel which gives way to a crawl space in the eaves of the house. It is here where you will find the notes, the letters and the jumble of collected junk which would allow you to piece together my own teenage life. Loneliness and connection alternate and echo in-game and out.

I was Sam. You can still find shades of her in the attic paper trail, the smattering of possessions to be jettisoned and the stories which bubble up on the rare occasions I see school friends. But Sam herself is gone and now I am Kaitlin. Kaitlin makes the past an easier place to visit but as the game nears its conclusion the loss of Sam is suddenly a keen one.

As the credits roll I burst into tears. I have Gone Home and I have gone home but I am not home.

I am standing outside the train station with my bags at my feet, painfully aware that I do not own a key to my parents' house. My arrival is unexpected and comes on the back of a transatlantic flight. I am exhausted but almost home.

I am standing in the front porch with my bags at my feet, painfully aware that I do not own a key to my parents' house. My arrival is unexpected and comes on the back of a transatlantic flight. I am exhausted but almost home.

I lost my keys three years ago in the snow after a friend's birthday party. Most were replaced immediately but the one to my parents' front door was always tucked away at the forgotten end of a to-do list. An unnecessary hassle and entirely my own fault.

I don't have a key yet. This isn't the house where I did most of my growing up. My parents moved about an hour's drive away while I was travelling through Europe and tonight will be the first time I see their - our - new place.

This house is not the one in which I did most of my growing up - that one is about an hour's drive away. A long spit of a building from whose windows I would climb down to watch the sunrise from the rolling slope of the municipal graveyard when I couldn't sleep. My parents moved house while I was at Glastonbury one year. I returned to an interim home and then joined them in their - our - new place.



I am looking forward to seeing my sister. I've been away for a long time and wonder how much has changed. I've sent back postcards picking out the cool things I've seen that she might want to share in somehow but missed out on the everyday and the mundane. She's changed schools and must have made new friends or lost older ones. Maybe she's different now?

I am looking forward to seeing my sister. I haven't been away long but in the time since we last saw each other her baby daughter has begun to crystallise from a warm wiggling morass of need into a tiny person. Maybe she's very different now?

I find the key under a tacky but well-loved Christmas duck ornament and let myself in. The place is dark.

I sidestep the key problem as my mother is home and rushes to the front door to let me in. I can see my sister in the brightly-lit front room pacing with her daughter, chatting singsong nonsense.

I move methodically from room to room, my family's life gradually being revealed to me in bursts. Each follows a cinematic trajectory. My sister - unhappiness, isolation, connection. My father - success, rejection, the glimmering embers of a career which may yet reignite. My mother - frustration, distraction, resolution.

I sit in the car and absorb slices of conversation, my family's life gradually easing into focus. My brother's academic work, my father's travels, my mother and my sister's involvement with the baby. I drive from place to place accumulating the impact of the thousand minor disappointments and triumphs; the abrasions of daily life.



The story my sister is unfurling through her diary entries becomes a tentative exploration of first love and I'm unsure as to whether I should be reading it even though all the entries are addressed to me. Through each one I hear her gradually arriving home; not physically but emotionally.

Nursing a mug of coffee I listen as a friend catches me up on seven years of her life. It is the day before I play Gone Home and the story she chooses to tell is a love story - one which starts in the ruins of an older love story and gradually swells into something beautiful. A place she can finally call home. It is sweet, mundane and monumental all at the same time. Her pain is recent enough to seep through in places but her joy is palpable. It is the same story as Gone Home although I don't know it yet.

Later, as myself and as Kaitlin, I listen to Sam describe her relationship. Together we scout out scrappy notes, magazines, pictures and mix tapes which describe who Sam is now and the flavour of her nineties teenage world. There's an X Files poster on the wall and a listing for the show circled in the TV guide, Riot Grrrl zines pepper the basement and badges are sprinkled throughout the house.



My own mother has asked me to go through my possessions while I'm at home including some boxes never unpacked from the house move. Three X Files guides and all my punk rock music CDs sit in the charity shop pile while the zines are destined for the tip. A handful of button badges hide away in a tiny box inside a wooden ottoman.

I climb the attic steps to Sam's safe space while sitting on the bed in my own attic room. My eyes drift over to the wall panel which gives way to a crawl space in the eaves of the house. It is here where you will find the notes, the letters and the jumble of collected junk which would allow you to piece together my own teenage life. Loneliness and connection alternate and echo in-game and out.

I was Sam. You can still find shades of her in the attic paper trail, the smattering of possessions to be jettisoned and the stories which bubble up on the rare occasions I see school friends. But Sam herself is gone and now I am Kaitlin. Kaitlin makes the past an easier place to visit but as the game nears its conclusion the loss of Sam is suddenly a keen one.

As the credits roll I burst into tears. I have Gone Home and I have gone home but I am not home.

For more on Gone Home, see our Gone Home review, and check out Robert Yang's analysis of Gone Home, Thief, and the mansion genre.

Article by Robert Yang. This post does not spoil any specifics of the "plot" in Gone Home, but it might sensitize you to its delivery mechanisms and some details.

Mansions are old, rich, and scary. Most "mansion games" (like Maniac Mansion, Thief, or Resident Evil) emphasize these qualities for specific effect, and they would not work without the mansion tropes at the core of their designs. The video game mansion starts as an alien place that, through repeated visits and backtracking, becomes YOUR MANSION because you know all the rooms and secret passages and stories inside it.

Gone Home is very aware of its place in the mansion genre, a genre that emphasizes "stuff" and who owns it -- inventories, objects, and possessions. Here, the lightweight puzzle gating and densely hot-spotted environments evoke adventure; the first person object handling and concrete readables evoke the immersive sim; the loneliness and the shadows evoke horror. In a sense, this is a video game that was made for gamers aware of all the genre convention going on (in particular, one moment in the library will either make you smile or wince, assuming you notice it) but in another sense, this is also a video game made for everyone.

A "gameism" (coined by Tom Bissell in his The Last of Us review) is a thing that makes perfect sense only within the context of a video game. Say you're playing an RPG and you talk to an NPC, and the NPC repeats the same line of dialogue over and over. Does that mean everyone in this town is a robot? No, it means the game is telling you to move on. So I shouldn't talk to any NPCs more than once? Well, not exactly. So when will an NPC say more than one thing? You'll just know.

This is extremely arbitrary and confusing for people who haven't played these games before. So Gone Home, among a growing number of narrative-based games, has a hunch: that a lot of these recurring gameisms stem from the huge gulf between an NPC's behavior and a semblance of consistency. Is it possible to have a game without NPCs, but keep the Cs? The answer is "yeah."

The characters in Gone Home are tolerable (or even great) because they do not hesitate in doorways and stare blankly at you. It's the same trick that Dear Esther pulled: fictional characters in games develop fuller-bodied, more nuanced personalities precisely when they're not constrained by fully simulated virtual bodies present in the world. (Maybe Dear Esther is actually a mansion game, in this sense?)



As invisible ghostly tour guides, these characters can narrate anything, anytime, without all the other problems that plague most virtual dramas: you don't have to justify how an NPC pathfound to your location, or why they react to some NPCs but not others, or what happens if you caress their face with with a box, etc. All these edge cases, these reactions that are complicated to engineer or script, easily created narrative dissonance for many players - but without NPCs, you no longer have to deal with them. So, I think the main strength of this narrative approach is that "plausibility of presence" becomes much less relevant.

The word here is "interiority" -- how we seem to have first-hand access to what the narrator thinks and feels. Everyone in this game pours out their feelings in numerous diaries and letters scattered around a house, which feels weird, but weird in the familiar way that novels are implausible, while also playing directly into the designers' hands. Does it feel weird and implausible only because we weren't white upper middle class American teenage girls living in the mid-1990s, bombarded by a particular strain of second-wave feminism that we can no longer identify with? Is this alienation similar to the alienation she was feeling?

A lot of Gone Home might feel alien to a lot of players, but unlike most sci-fi games, this game is actually about alienation from people and society. None of the characters feel particularly at-home in the mansion, and each family member is mostly buried in their own plot line and rarely interacts with the rest of the family. How can you connect with these people? Playing every first person shooter since Doom will not help you understand them any better because Gone Home leans on real-life cultural things, not game logic. Understanding what Reed College means, or what Riot Grrrl culture signifies, or who reads thriller paperback novels sold at airports, or what kind of person goes to Earth Wind and Fire concerts, or what a vapid postcard from a teenager in Europe sounds like... This game is less concerned with ludonarrative coherence than old fashioned narra-narrative coherence.



"Density" is Steve Gaynor's word for it. How much meaning are you packing into a space, and how does a player make sense of it? But filling spaces with stuff is useless if players don't know to look for it.

In Wolfenstein 3D, there were a few player strategies for finding secrets: unusual wall decoration, numerous wall alcoves, or certain wall sections framed peculiarly by plants or lights. There was also a second deeper strategy that you might call "layout analysis": to reason where hallways went and where space remained, to remember which areas you could see into but never actually visited. If you saw treasure or health behind a column, you knew there must have been a secret push-wall to get behind there, somewhere, somehow.

Thief framed "reading the environment" in a different way. Mansions offered probability puzzles, asking players to predict how much treasure will be in a given room (bathroom = 1% chance, bedroom = 40% chance, throne room = 100%, etc.) - and if you enter a king's bedroom, and there's no treasure to be found, then that makes no sense - and you'd better start looking for a secret button at his bedside, or a secret lever near the fireplace, or maybe douse the fire in the fireplace and look inside it.

It's about setting up patterns that players can read, and then pacing those patterns as informal puzzles. In this way, Gone Home functions much like Thief.

One bedroom might be densely packed with narrative objects and artifacts - which makes sense, because bedrooms are culturally read in Western culture as private spaces associated closely with specific person(s). However, you wouldn't expect a small half-bathroom to be nearly as personalized, especially if it connects directly to the foyer - that would be read as a public-facing bathroom for guests. The cultural program, imbued within your understanding of American mansion architecture, helps you play Gone Home and maybe even "solve" it.



Gone Home goes one step further though, and uses a sort of "layering" to forge connections between different objects. For instance, if you're in a public-facing room of the house, then who owns the stuff in that room? (A lot of Gone Home pivots on this question, of who owns which spaces?) To help you figure that out, objects frequently overlap each other: something that belongs to one character might sit on top of a leaflet they picked up, which sits on top of a letter they received. It uses these spatial connections to emphasize the narrative connections between things and what they symbolize.

It's also worth pointing out that Gone Home wouldn't feel nearly as fluent if it was made with technology from 10 years ago. Sufficiently advanced physics simulation that lets you stack stuff on top of stuff? Switchable dynamic lighting that help you remember whether you explored an area before or not? Very high resolution textures for all the different readables? I think we often pretend many video games could've been made at any time in the history of game development, and we downplay the influence of graphics technology as a mindless indulgence / crime against the Great God of Gameplay.

But I think a lot of Gone Home works because of where we are in video games today, design-wise and graphics-wise. It is totally a product of its time that strives to be timeless: it's like how you've never lived in a mansion, but you can totally sympathize with the people who do.

DISCLOSURE: Rob playtested Gone Home at various stages in its development. This article was originally posted on Rob's always-interesting Radiator Design blog.

Every connection we feel with another human being begins with a gradual descent through layers of familiarity until we touch something unique or resonant, when we go from the general idea of a person to the specific. Gone Home makes that process visible, and through the first-person exploration of one family’s home, turns it into a surprising and moving game.

It’s 1995, and Kaitlin Greenbriar has come home eager to reunite with her family after a year-long adventure in Europe. Instead she finds a deserted house and an apologetic note from her sister Sam begging her not to dig around “trying to find out where I am.”

By the end of your three-to-four-hour exploration of the house, you’ll find out where Sam and your parents have gone. What happened to them, though, isn’t as important as why – and you uncover that why by rummaging through a warren of rooms in an enormous house that includes hidden panels, secret passages, and a basement larger than my entire apartment. You’ll open every door, turn over and examine every tissue box, and find embarrassing stuff in closets.

Gone Home requires you to use your own empathy to solve the puzzle of each family member’s internal struggle. Sam’s story takes precedence, the examination of some items triggering readings from her journal (performed with impeccable, vivid immediacy). We sense her frustration when abysmal teachers try to squash her creativity. We’ve got her back when she sneaks out to a live show. And we experience her dizzying plunge into first love with Lonnie, a young woman whose feelings are slowly revealed to her (“I don’t think Lonnie even gets Lonnie sometimes”) much as Sam’s are to us.



She’s likeable, creative, headstrong and about to crash-land into adulthood. Who wouldn’t see a bit of themselves in her and root for this passionate teenager? This sentimentality can be moving at times, but the way her story feels unambiguously administered rather than intuited weakens the premise and challenge of the game. She gradually becomes less an individual and more an avatar immersed in evocative symbols of a time and place: a poster with the names of Black Francis and Lisa Loeb; cassette tapes with handwritten inset cards; console cartridges, and cheat codes scrawled on pieces of paper.

Gone Home is a game that seems to emerge from a deep, creative restlessness with the testosterone-and-adrenaline fuelled conventions of videogames. But it doesn’t respond by merely dressing up literary devices with indie whimsy and calling it interactive storytelling: the characters and their stories don’t exist without your insight and emotional intelligence. We’ve all understood in a general sense that videogames can tell stories in a way no other medium can. Gone Home is the definitive proof.


Expect to pay: £15 / $20
Release: Out now
Developer: The Fullbright Company
Publisher: In-house
Multiplayer: None
Link: www.gonehomegame.com

The Independent Games Festival has renewed its deal with Valve to give shortlisted finalists of the 2014 IGF Awards an automagical Golden Ticket onto Steam. All main competition finalists will be offered a distribution deal, whether they're nominated in the individual Excellence categories, the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, or the Nuovo Award. "Nuovo" being IGF speak for "kinda weird".

Thanks to the IGF 2013 deal, Steam became home to games like Kentucky Route Zero, Starseed Pilgrim, Bientot l'Ete, Gone Home, MirrorMoon EP, and - winner of the Grand Prize, Nuovo and Narrative awards - Cart Life. It's arguable that many of the games would have eventually secured distribution without the guaranteed offer, but the partnership remains a pretty convenient shortcut for indies.

It's going to be especially interesting this year to see how the nomination list compares to Steam's own Greenlight approval list. Valve's wisdom-of-the-crowds voting system is supposed to make it easier for quality indie games to get onto the storefront, but its success at doing so is debatable. At the very least, the Steam/IGF deal gives acclaimed projects a second chance, even if they didn't capture the attention of Greenlight's core voter base.

The 16th IGF will run from the 17-21st March, 2014. The finalists will be announced January.